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Ever had or seen an Amiga machine? Well, if you did, there’s a chance to have a nostalgic rush to the past, if you didn’t, there’s a chance for you to see how the once living Amiga machines looked like. And all that with your N900.
UAE4ALL is a Commodore Amiga emulator, which will emulate the Amiga 500. For it to work, you’ll need a Kickstart ROM. Kickstart 1.3 works best, but 2.0 runs too and is required for some 600 games (Cannon Fodder, one of my all-time favorites, would need a 2.0, for example). Unfortunately, I can’t give you an exact link for the ROM, but you sure know where to find it, right?
I tried booting with both Kickstart 1.3 and 2.0 and most of the games I tried worked quite well.
One of the things you should note: controls are not very intuitive, so check out this FAQ page, which also might answer some of the questions you might have about the emulator.
Fetch the emulator form Extras with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install uae4all
and dive into Amiga classic programs and games!

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Are you an engineer or an engineering student? Then a scientific calculator is a must-have for you! AlmostTI will turn your N900 into one of the Texas Instruments Sci Calcs that beat pretty much every calculator app that is available for the N900!

AlmostTI is a Texas Instruments Sci Calc emulator and a really great one! It will emulate TI73, TI82, TI83, TI83+, TI83+ SE, TI85, and TI86 (some models will require you to locate a ROM for them, as the app doesn’t include it by default) and emulate them really well, making pretty much every single function usable! Writing code, graphical calculations, anything that a real TI can do, Almost Real TI can do as well.
See for yourself, fetch the emulator from Extras with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install ati85
The only thing I found weird is the lack of documentation. It took me some time to figure out that you need to tap the top-left corner of the screen for a menu that will allow you to choose which calc to emulate. The top-right corner quits the emulator.
Totally the best calc app for the N900, and a must-have for the engineers, ATI85 is something you would really like to have on your N900. Especially since real TI-eighties don’t actually fit into a pocket.

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Enjoy reading? Enjoy interactive fiction? Well, some happy news for you, in addition to Ren’Py for visual novels, with a Maemo port of Gargoyle you have tons of interactive fiction in your pocket!
For those who never heard of Gargoyle yet, it is a very advanced interactive fiction interpreter that supports many-many different formats, like z-machine (Inform), glulx, tads, agility, alan, hugo, level 9, magnetic, scare and more!
With that much formats you can play many sorts of fiction, allowing you to choose many genres and play famous games, such as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy or Zork. For those of you in search for fiction to read (or play, if that is how you prefer to say it), you can find game archives with the help of search engines. One of the most famous archives is IFArchive, which has games for most platforms Gargoyle can handle. Just grab the file for the game and launch it either from a command line with gargoyle [gamefile] or from a graphical menu.

Gargoyle can be obtained via the Extras catalogue with:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install gargoyle
GET it, but don’t forget a light source.

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Just yesterday, I was on my way home. Usually, I listen to the music while out on the street, but my audio player wasn’t with me and it’s been a while since I have uploaded any fresh music into my N900. Luckily, I had all my music on my home PC (which was conveniently running) and with an N900, I sure can access and listen to it. Want to know how? I’ll show you in this guide.

This guide assumes the machine you’re connecting to runs a *nix system (GNU/Linux, BSD, MacOS). For getting SSH up with Windows, refer to this guide by Lifehacker.
First things first, you would want to have SSH running on your machine with the music. Make sure you start it and have the SSH port unlocked on the machine.
If you are unsure how to do that, see this guide for Ubuntu, which will work for most other GNU/Linux distros with minor changes, or refer to your system’s documentation.
Obviously, you also need OpenSSH on your N900, which you can get with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install openssh
if you don’t have it already. Now, let’s look at the methods you can use to start playing music from a remote machine on your N900.
You can use MPlayer + SSH. This is a faster, but a slightly inconvenient way, for which you need MPlayer on your N900.
If you don’t have it, get it with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install mplayer
Then, you can use this command:
ssh <user>@<remote-address> “cat <full-path-to-file>” | mplayer -
Where <user> is your username on the machine, <remote-address> is your machine’s IP address and <full-path-to-file> is the full path to the file you want to play.
The inconvenience of this is that you won’t be able to play many files at once and you’ll have to use the full path to the file.
A better method is sshfs. Again, if you don’t have sshfs, grab it with
sudo gainroot
apt-get install sshfs
Create a directory, which you’ll use (as root):
mkdir /home/user/Home-PC
Finally, mount your machine’s filesystem on that directory with sshfs:
sshfs <user>@<remote-address>: /home/user/Home-PC
There, you can now access the whole home directory of your home PC via /home/user/Home-PC and that means (besides other files) you can …

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Note: this how-to is aimed at advanced users. Messing something up may harm your device, everything is done at your own risk.
Want to keep record of all your call durations? Well, while the functionality is not included by default, there’s a hack that can help you out. All we need to do is to patch the SQL database.
Note: You don’t need to be root for following the guide.
Open up your X Terminal and cd into a folder we need:
cd /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger
Make a backup of your original database file, just to be sure:
cp -a el-v1.db el-v1.db.backup
Download the patch (you’ll need wget, if you don’t have it, install it with sudo gainroot; apt-get install wget):
wget ‘http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=10495&amp;d=1275242093′ -O triggers.txt
Apply the patch:
sqlite3 -batch /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db < triggers.txt
Finally, install Extended Call Log from Extras:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install extcalllog 
You’re finished! Now the call durations will start recording. Please note that it will just start, so you’ll need to go through a couple of calls before you can see the durations.

Enjoy!

Thanks to kovach from TMO for the patch.

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Ever since J2ME have spawned, it has been widely used by pretty much any mobile platform. However, J2ME support on the N900 is rather lacking, which has become a problem, but not an unsolvable one. Some of you may have heard of MicroEmu, but as it is written on Java (SE version) itself, it is very RAM consuming, making apps slower. PhoneME is an alternative written in C, and while it is still in testing, a rather good one.

Since the emulator is still in testing, the most progressive version can be fetched through this link. Get the file and open it with your App Manager. Alternatively, do it faster via the command line:
sudo gainroot
dpkg -i cvm*.deb

After installation you will have several new items in the menu:
Run Midlet will run a specified .jar file. You can also use it through a command line:
/opt/phoneme/bin/runmidlet <path_to_jar_file>
Midlet Settings will, obviously, open up a settings menu, where you can customize a few things, like fullscreen launching or portrait mode.
Finally, there’s a preinstalled Opera Mini and Microemu-demo for testing using/testing purposes.
Well, I should definitely say that the performance of the apps is very, very good. Opera Mini starts up in seconds, unlike it did in MicroEmu and works very well, you can as well use it as an alternative browser.
Some other apps I’ve tried work just as well: sounds, network etc. are all functional.

A few downsides include the inability to handle .jad files well and some sound glitches, but that can be forgiven, given that the emulator is still in development.
So go and get it, it’ll be worth it.
 

Thanks to Salut Ct for yet another good suggestion. Have your own suggestions? Please leave them in the comments, we’ll definitely look into them and give you credit!

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If you’ve been using the N900 for a while, perhaps you have been thinking on “how can I record my screen?”. Well, today we’ll show you how.
First of all, fetch a .deb package you will need for recording to your N900, put it anywhere.  You may, of course, use wget to ease the process:
wget http://sumoudou.org/n900/load-applet-ximagesrc_0.4.4-2_armel.deb
Next, install the package:
sudo gainroot
dpkg -i load-applet-ximagesrc*.deb
And install the missing dependencies:
apt-get -f install
There, now you have a little panel on your N900 that will allow you to record your screen (and make screenshots, if you’re not comfortable with Ctrl-Shift-P):

When you press the button that I showed above and exit the statusbar menu, recording will start and you can now make videos, like this one I made. When you press the button again recording will stop. And yes, it will also record sound from the microphone, however the audio input is rather sensitive and will capture screentapping sounds and keyboard, so you might want to mute the sound, like I did. You will find your video in your Videos folder (~/MyDocs/.videos). By pressing the camera button to the right you can take screenshots, tap it and press the camera button (on the top of your N900) to take a screenshot which will land in your images directory.
Enjoy your new screencasting experience!
 

Thanks to ShiroiKuma for putting up the package together.

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Ever wanted to control your desktop computer right from your N900‘s screen? This post will show you how to do that using PresenceVNC.
This guide is for *nix (GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS) users. Windows users can look up a guide on setting up VNC online and try the same, by connecting to their PC directly, however, without ssh this will be much less secure.
First of all, fetch PresenceVNC from your N900:
sudo gainroot
sudo apt-get install presencevnc
Get openssh too, if you don’t have it:
apt-get install openssh
Now, on your PC you’ll need to generate an SSH key (again, if you don’t have it yet):
ssh-keygen -t dsa
This will create a file ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
You will have to drop this file into the same directory from your PC to the N900, you can use file sharing sites, USB, ssh, whatever you want for that.
Verify that you have the SSH server running on your PC, try to SSH into it:
ssh <user>@<ip_address>
Repalce <user> with your username on the PC and <ip_address> with your PC’s IP address. If you don’t know it, use sites like this one. If your PC and the N900 are connected to the same network, you can usually try the local address, 192.168.1.33 or 192.168.1.34. It should ask you to verify the key (type ‘yes’) and your PC’s password. IF it doesn’t then it’s likely your 22nd port is closed, use tools like iptables or Firestarter to open it.
You will also need x11vnc to start the server, look it up in your distro’s repositories.
Once that is set up, open up your N900‘s terminal and connect to your PC with the following command:

ssh -C -L 5900:localhost:5900 <user>@<ip_address>
And start the server (yes, right from your N900)
x11vnc -ncache 10 -display :0
Now, just open up PresenceVNC (don’t quit the terminal!) and connect to localhost:0 Watch in amazement as your PC is fully controlled through your N900.
On the screenshot below you can see IceCat opened on my ArchLinux desktop’s StumpWM:

Enjoy!

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Note: This guide is aimed only at advanced users. Messing something up during the installation might break your device, so do not attempt anything, unless you are sure you can handle it.
With the “hackability” of the N900 there’s quite a lot of alternative mobile operating systems available for it. We already covered NITDroid and Mer, and today I’m going to direct you through the installation of another mobile system I find very promising, SHR.
SHR is a GNU/Linux based OS that is available for quite many devices, all of which can be found by surfing through the project’s wiki. Surely, for a mobile OS, it can perform phone calls, end SMS, use GPS all while being a well-working GNU/Linux system, just like Maemo is. So, onto installation.
You will require all these things:

A Nokia N900, updated to a latest PR (which is 1.3).
A MicroSD card with a large capacity (at least 4 gB).

Class and brand of the SD card plays a huge role here. A class 10 card is preferable. Cards are mostly “what-you-pay-is-what-you-get”, so the more expensive card is usually the better one.

U-Boot installed on your N900

Get U-boot from Extras-devel, if you don’t have it. Reboot the phone to verify installation, there should be a mention of U-Boot and usually a picture of Tux (a penguin) in a corner. Make sure to disable extras-devel after installing U-boot.

A PC with a cardreader.
An N900 Image of SHR

Get the image from here.
The guide assumes you’re using a *nix machine. Windows users can use a small GNU/Linux LiveCD for following the guide.
Now, slot your MicroSD card into your cardreader. You’ll want to repartition it.
If you don’t understand the repartition process via a commandline, you can use GParted or a similar partitioning manager.
Verify the name of the SD device with
sudo fdisk -l
It should look like /dev/sdX with X being a letter. Make sure it’s the correct device name by mounting it or otherwise checking.
If you have automounting enabled, unmount the card:
sudo umount <card_mount_point>
Run fdisk on the card:
fdisk /dev/sdX
Obviously, replace sdX with your actual device name. For testing purposes, just a single ext3 partition is okay:
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First …

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Note: this how-to is aimed at advanced users. Messing something up during the installation or usage may harm your device, everything is done at your own risk.
Being an ultimate hacker device, the N900 is often prone to getting software issues during your playful experiments. When that happens, don’t go strait to reflashing your device, it may still be rescued with a rescue initrd image provided by MeeGo! This how-to will show you how to install and use the initrd image for rescuing your N900.

The first part of the how-to assumes you’re using a *nix system (GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS) on your PC , information on Windows installation can be found below.
On your PC, open up the terminal. Make a new directory, where the image will be kept, and cd into it:
mkdir n900-rescue-initrd
cd n900-rescue-initrd
Now, get the rpm files for the image from the MeeGo repos:
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/nokia-n900-rescue-initrd-0.1-2.157.armv7l.rpm
wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.1/core/repos/armv7l/packages/armv7l/kernel-n900-2.6.35.3-10.3.armv7l.rpm
Now, you’ll need to unpack the rpm packages using rpm2cpio. If you don’t have it, it should be available from your distribution’s repos. Else, you might try using a BASH or Perl versions, execute them the same way, as you would execute rmp2cpio.
rpm2cpio nokia-n900-*.rpm | cpio -vid ./boot/initrd*
rpm2cpio kernel-*n900-*.rpm | cpio -vid ./boot/vmlinuz*
Now you will have a directory named boot that will contain the files required.
Before you start the initrd charge your battery completely. The initrd doesn’t support charging and you want to be sure your phone won’t die when the initrd is in use.
To start the initrd, you’ll need to use the N900 flasher, please read this article, if you don’t understand what I mean. Note, we’re not reflashing the device, we’re just loading the image into the device’s memory on boot.
Shutdown the device by removing the battery and putting it back, then start the flasher in the same directory with
sudo flasher-3.5 -k boot/<vmlinuz-n900> -n boot/<initrd.img> -l -b”rootdelay=1 root=/dev/ram0″
Replace <vmlinuz-n900> and <initrd.img> with the actual file names.
After it is started, plug your N900 to your PC with a USB cord. Your device should now boot and you’ll get a menu with the following features:

Toggle USB networking on/off (N)
Reboot the device (R)
Shutdown the device …

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Whenever you’re surfing the net, you do want to be concerned about your online privacy. A lot of information can get to the wrong hands if you don’t. One of the good ways to protect your network privacy is an onion router: Tor.
Now if you don’t know what onion routing is, in short, using it will have your connections bounce through many various Tor servers before reaching their destination. Everything is encrypted, which will make tracking down your path difficult, thus keeping your identity safe. The picture below shows exactly how it works:

With Maemo being a complete GNU/Linux distribution, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can use Tor there, very easily, and with a status applet for your convenience. If you want to use it, just fetch off a package from Extras:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install status-area-applet-tor
The package will pull down Tor as one of its dependencies, so yes, you can now use Tor to protect yourself, just open up your status area menu and you’ll see a button!

Click it, and you’ll be able to run Tor and have your network connection routed. Very easy.
 

When using Tor you should note two things:
1. Now your connections are bouncing through various servers, so the connection is slower than it usually is. You have to pay for your anonymity.
2. Even Tor has  it’s weaknesses, and besides that there are other ways to identify you, if somebody needs that, like flash cookies, fingerprinting, etc. so don’t rely on it strongly and don’t think you can do naughty stuff on the net without getting caught.

Have questions or suggestions? Maybe a problem? Drop us a comment or leave a post on our forum and we’ll look into it.

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Interested in installing another OS on your N900? Well, then you might want to try Mer, a libre operating system based on MeeGo. This guide will teach you how to install it using a *nix (GNU/Linux; BSD; and, technically, MacOS) system. If you’re a Windows user, refer to this post.
First of all all, you’d want to have all these things:

A Nokia N900, updated to a latest PR (which is 1.3).

If you have an N900, it’s highly unlikely you’ve got an outdated firmware. However, if you do (check it in About Product), please refer to this article.

A MicroSD card with a capacity of at least 4GiB.

Class and brand of the SD card plays a huge role here. A class 10 card is preferable. Cards are mostly “what-you-pay-is-what-you-get”, so the more expensive card is usually the better one. Do read the benchmark test for the card, you’d want the one that has a high random read/write.

U-Boot installed on the N900

Get U-boot from Extras-devel, if you don’t have it. Reboot the phone to verify installation, there should be a mention of U-Boot and usually a picture of Tux (a penguin) in a corner. Make sure to disable extras-devel after installing U-boot.

A *nix PC with a cardreader.
And an image for Nemo Mobile

Get an appropriate image here. Latest release have been proven to have a bug when installing on an SD card, so look for an older release.
Once you have all that, onto installation!
Slot in your MicroSD card into a cardreader. Find out the name of the card device with
sudo fdisk -l
If you have automounting enabled, you’ll want to unmount the card:
sudo umount /dev/<name_of_the_card_partition>
Replace <name_of_the_card_partition> with an actual name of your card’s partition. Usually it’s something like “/dev/sdx1″
Now, write an image to a device with dd:
sudo dd bs=4096 if=<full_path_to_the_image> of=/dev/<name_of_the_card_device>
NOTE: the <name_of_the_card_device> is an actual device, not a partition. So, if your partition was named /dev/sdx1, you’ll want to use /dev/sdx as <name_of_the_card_device>
Replace <full_path_to_the_image> with a (duh) full path to your Nemo Mobile image you downloaded, unpacked from the bz2 file.
If your card doesn’t have sufficient space, use this command instead. Replace <full_path_to_the_image> with the name of the …

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Interested in video calling from your N900? You probably know about Skype, but there are better alternatives available, like SIP.
SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, is a signalling protocol, which is used mostly for controlling video and audio calls. And Maemo has a good native support for it! Let’s see how to setup an SIP account on your N900.
Before everything else, you’d want to get yourself an SIP account. There are literally hundreds of providers, so find one that suits you, just look them up in a search engine, like Google.
After you get one, you’ll want to go to your account settings. If you already have defined an account for other services, you can access the menu by pressing the “Availability” button on your notification menu. If not, you can find it under “Settings->VoIP and IM Accounts”. Add a new account, choose SIP as service. You’ll see a similar box to popup:

Now, just input your SIP address and password. Take Advanced Settings into account, most providers will require you to put in an outbound proxy and define a username. Refer to instructions on your provider’s website on whether you should put them there. Save everything and enable the account, login by switching the status to ‘Available”. Now, you’re ready to call SIP addresses and make regular calls via SIP, just select your SIP account as a call type in your Phone app. Video calling is available too, just find a contact you wish to call, select it and choose to videocall.

SIP is a very good (and much more open) alternative to Skype, so why not use it?
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Thanks to our reader, Steven O’ Dochartaigh, who asked us to do this how-to. Have your own suggestions? Put them up in the comments, or on our forum, and we’ll be sure to give them a look!

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With all the latest hype about QR-codes, you must certainly would want a QR scanner on your phone. Especially if you’re living in Japan, where QR-codes are most popular.
Well, the N900 sure has a QR-scanner, and a pretty good one! mBarCode, together with a QR plugin can read both barcode and QR information.

You can get both mBarCode and the QR-plugin from the Extras repo:
sudo gainroot
apt-get install mbarcode mbarcode-plugin-qrcode
Launch the application and now you have a very good scanner! Target your camera at a QR or a barcode and the information gets read almost instantly. Links and other “can-be-malicious” content is shown to you before getting opened with your tap. You can even check the shortlinks by copying them and visiting this site.
You can also store the scanned code into a file, or read the code from a file you stored. That way you can use the codes later, or scan the codes downloaded from a website.

With all that, mBarCode is a must-have if you’re used to dealing with QR and barcodes.
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In case if you’d want to test how it works and you don’t have any scannable codes around, you can use an online generator, like this one.

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Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!
Are you in a liking of chess games? Playing with the AI doesn’t seem as good as playing with real players for you? Then you should totally check out Miniature, an FICS client for Maemo!

Miniature is currently only available at Extras-devel, which means you would want it enabled in your repo list. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean the game is not good enough for everyday use, I myself have tested many releases and they work perfectly. In case if you need help enabling it, check out this wiki article. Make sure to disable it right after downloading the package though.
Now, Miniature enables you to play games hosted at FICS with thousands of players all across the world and even allows you to play P2P games with people nearby or with people in your contacts list. Registering at FICS is not required, but is recommended, if you want to keep easy track of your own games and stats. Host a game or join one of those already available and you’re ready to dive into a nice game of chess with anyone. And you even have easy to use text chat!

Miniature also holds quite some learning possibilities, as you can watch games already played, view chess lessons and participate in one of the tournaments FICS often holds! In case if you would want to play different kinds of chess, like antichess, Miniature allows that too.
 
A great client for every chess player, or just somebody who would want a nice game while waiting for the bus to arrive, Miniature is definitely worth checking out.